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Cricket clips

LTTE adherents attack Sri Lankans in London after the final.

So far eight such incidents had been reported and 16 youths were injured. Two of them had serious injuries and were taken to the nearby hospital. They were later discharged after treatment. All these pre planned attacks took place while Police were present and so far no proper action has been taken to catch the culprits. However when  Police officers were  about the attacks, they have replied to the victims that they do not have enough manpower (police officers) to take effective action..

Later the victims of three separate incidents have reported to the Paddington Green Police Station. Almost all the victims were British Sri Lankans mainly Sinhalese and one British Tamil received minor bruises from the attacks. There were many such incidents according to the information getting but unreported. Few vehicles belongs to Sri Lankans parked closer by were damaged too.

The haves and have-nots plan

The ICC’s general manager for cricket Dave Richardson has made a suggestion that will set the cat firmly amongst the pigeons.

“It’s an important point that Test cricket should be played against teams that are at least competitive with each other,” Richardson told Cricinfo. “Ideally, you want to have the top teams playing against each other, and then teams of lesser standing playing against each other, maybe in a second division or a lesser competition such as the Intercontinental Cup. I think that’s the challenge for the ICC, that it can create some sort of context for Test cricket both at the higher level and at levels below that.”

Sounds just fine, as far as it goes: A two-tier Test system with promotions and relegations will provide context to the contests; by way of side benefits, it will avoid the farcical situation of teams and players inflating their records and averages with regular fixtures against the weaker sides. You want more pros? Once you have a tiered Test system, you can move towards organizing a world Test championship — fewer teams will permit the officials to draw up a home-and-away cycle that resolves the Test crown every two years, three tops.

The problem? This.

If the first of your two tiers comprise the 10 nations currently playing Test cricket and the second comprises the best of the associate nations, then the purpose is defeated and you are right back where you started from.

If, however, you attempt to divide the existing Test nations into two-tiers, stand by for uproar. The teams in the second tier will claim, with considerable justification, that by creating a situation where they cannot play the top teams, the ICC has dramatically curtailed their ability to monetize the game, and that without the money brought in by high profile teams, cricket in their respective countries will die an unnatural death.

An option that has been discussed in the past and likely will be again is the one where the top tier nations contribute part of their take into an ICC fund which will be used to beef up the coffers of the bottom tier. Guess who will object to that and why? [It's like the time I used to be a steward, and got assigned permanently to the night shift. The hotel I worked in -- Chola Sheraton, in Madras -- brought in this insane system that you had to dump the tips you got in a common basket, and everyone shared equally once a week. The problem? The night shift is considerably more demanding, and pulls more than double the tips, of the day shift; why the devil would I want to do all the hard work, and share with those who have it easier?]

The ICC has been working over the last year towards lending context and meaning to Test cricket to make it more competitive and attractive for spectators. Last year, officials had discussed the possibility of holding a Test championship where the TV revenue flows into a common pool. But the idea was shot down primarily by India and England, who would end up contributing as bulk of that money. The other significant idea to be discussed is for countries to designate Tests between top cricketing nations as full-fledged five-Test “icon series”. India and England have already signed one such agreement.

This tier system has all the earmarks of a good idea that will never get implemented, at least not in a democratic system where each team has a vote in the ICC council.

Web shavings

The poor little poor girl

1. Indian tennis star Sania Mirza is among the millions in this country living below the poverty line. [Hat tip: Hemant Puthli]

2. An old joke went thus: during a class on global over-population, the professor pointed out that somewhere in China, a woman was giving birth once every two seconds. So what are we going to do about it, he asked.

‘Find her and stop her,’ suggested the class smartass.

What won’t work in reproduction works just fine in crime, though: the arrest of one family has bought crime rates in a British county to a 20-year low.

3. X-ray equipment at Ohio airport discovered something suspicious. The woman who owned the suitcase in question said it was pickles. That made the officials even more suspicious. The bomb squad was summoned. The bomb squad arrived. It detonated — pickles.

4. Man plays audio porn to chase away kids. And the kids ran away? That is not how I remember my childhood.

5. Imagine Manmohan Singh and LK Advani settling their differences this way.

6. Putting the ‘lay’ in Lay’s, a woman accepts a bag of chips in exchange for sex, which incidentally tells you how bad the recession is. [Statutary warning: Don't try this at home]

The Obama XI

One of the links sent in by friends through Facebook, in response to my diary rescue post of yesterday, is to an old Financial Times article [Registration required, but it's painless] on why Barack Obama needs to take his foreign policy cues from cricket, not baseball. Sample argument:

The Afghan cover drive

Fourth, in foreign policy as in cricket, you cannot win a match with a single swing, regardless of the beauty of your cover drive.

The invasion of Iraq demonstrated a baseball player’s mentality. Mr Bush thought he could fix all the problems of the Middle East at once: displace Saddam Hussein and the regimes around him would tumble like dominoes, tyranny would end, the Palestinians would make a deal, the price of oil would fall and the US would acquire new bases in the region. Perhaps if Mr Bush had coached a cricket team rather than owning a baseball franchise, he might have taken a different approach. He certainly would have understood that a match-winning innings is built over the course of many hours and hundreds of shots.

Interesting piece, but it left out a cautionary warning on the downside of being captain: your team-mates could be the ones stuffing up in many ways, on and off the field, but you are the one who gets to be burnt in effigy.

Storm in a C-cup

A little over three years ago, I went to Times Square to try out my then-new camera, a Canon EOS 30-D, and spent so long experimenting with exposures while trying to capture one particular billboard that my wife *gently* suggested I was treading the thin line separating aesthete from voyeur [photographer from the pornographer is how she put it, if memory serves].

Takes more than two to tango

It was a two-story high Calvin Klein billboard, with the obligatory male and female models revealing considerable acreage of bare skin, in a pose suggestive of imminent coitus [Aargh! 'Coitus'?! Who uses such words any more? I meant to say, 'a pose suggesting they were just about to fuck'].

CK ads routinely push the envelope, and as routinely get into trouble [this Eva Mendes effort, as exemplar; another take on the same ad]. Even by the company’s standards, though, the latest billboard [images], a five-storey monster featured this time in a SoHo neighborhood, would seem to be pushing it.

The predictable fuss broke out [here's the Fox story; and here's ABC, text and video]; as predictably, CK pulled the ad and will likely replace it with a tamer version it would have kept ready, having learnt from past experience. In any case, the ad has done its work by garnering a mountain of ink and invaluable TV time, with all the major networks doing the stereotypical ‘outrage’ pieces.

It is those TV pieces that amuse me the most. Check this CBS effort out. And this MSNBC effort.

Notice those loving closeups that would have done credit to a show-and-tell anatomy class? The TV coverage is little more than getting random men and women to provide sound bytes as an excuse to repeatedly go close up on the images that have supposedly created the ‘outrage’.

That billboard would have been seen only by those walking past the SoHo neighborhood; thanks to TV and the internet, now everyone’s seen it. Which suits the company and its ad makers just fine.

From my archives, a tangentially related case study on suggestive CK ads.

Under increasing pressure and scrutiny, Klein recalled the ads, but not before the ensuing controversy and publicity had turned his jeans into the “must-have” item of the season. As one marketing director noted, this controversy took Klein’s “coolness factor from a 10 to a 60,” and if continued sales are any indication, his “bad boy” reputation has only enhanced his products in the eyes of young consumers.

And by way of an o tempora, o mores aside, remember the time the ads below were deemed risque?